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5 best cloud solutions for small businesses
Cloud services are considered as the ideal solution for small, medium and large corporations as they only require efficient and affordable hosting platform. No matter if your organization requires an instant access to files, sharing files with colleagues and clients or reliable data backup solution, cloud is here to cater all such problems. Some of the best cloud solutions for businesses are mentioned below so that a person can get a better idea which one to use as a cloud service.
Amazon Web Services (AWS):
Amazon offers a variety of cloud hosting services. These include, “Pay as you go”. Two major concepts are associated with the approach of pay as you go. These are “pay less when you reserve” and “pay even less per unit by using more”. This strategy of “Pay as you go” of AWS allows the organization to pay only for the resources they are using without any upfront costs and long term commitments. Whereas “Pay less when you reserve” allows a person to pay only for the reserved capacity and in return some saving offers and discounts are provided. In addition, organizations get increased storage space and data transfer at lowest rates.
IDrive:
IDrive is responsible to provide storage plans to businesses and individuals which range in between free to $74.62 per year. IDrive not only provides service back up to your computer but it also allows an organization to share files along with syncing facility. IDrive offer following features:
- Share folders and files via Facebook, email and Twitter.
- Mobile access
- Remote management tools
- Online syncing of files.
IDrive also has a facility to provide data backup for files and multiple devices at run time. This service provides high security as files is transferred and stored with 256-bit AES encryption.
The pros and cons of cloud hosting
Services of cloud hosting are adopted by many entrepreneurs and many organizations as it provides a number of benefits to manage organizational activities efficiently. It allows you to access all applications of your company from anywhere in the world. Adopting cloud hosting services enables organizations to respond according to continuously changing requirements of Information Technology sector. With the implementation of cloud computing, organizations have changed their way to run their applications and to store information.
Instead of using desktop applications for hosting data, everything is now shifted on “cloud” and it is used mainly for hosting purposes. Implementing such type of web-based computing releases from issues that individual can face while using desktop applications. But it is important to consider that cloud hosting is not for everyone. Before deciding whether to use cloud services or not it is necessary to have a look at pros and cons of cloud hosting.
Let us take a look at how a user can take benefit from cloud hosting services:
Pros of Cloud Hosting:
Computer costs:
In order to run cloud computing web-based applications, it is not important to have high-powered computer systems. It is mainly because these applications run inside the cloud, not on computer systems. So, in case of less expensive PC with less memory and smaller hard disk one can easily use cloud services as it doesn’t involve some heavy software.
Improved Performances:
Only a few programs of less memory need to run on PC to avail cloud hosting services. As a cloud consumer, you only have to put your computer in cloud system boot and it will run with high-class speed because only a few programs are loaded into memory.
Storage Capacity:
The main advantage of using cloud services is that cloud consumer can avail virtually limitless storage. This storage space can be in hundreds of petabytes. This allows cloud consumer to store anything he/she wants.
Data reliability:
In desktop computing, the crash of hard disk is enough to delete all vulnerable data of any organization. But in the cloud, in case of computer crashes the data will not be affected as it is stored in the cloud and it is accessed easily.
Group collaboration:
Using cloud services will allow cloud consumers to share documents with multiple users at once. It enables several users to collaborate on projects and documents as they are hosted inside the cloud not specifically on personal computers.
Undoubtedly there are several pros of cloud hosting but there are lots of risks involved with cloud services. These are as follows:
Cons of cloud hosting:
Availability of internet:
To avail services of cloud, it is most important to have a good internet connection as cloud services can never be accessed without internet. In simple words, without internet, cloud computing won’t work.
Can be slow:
Whether cloud consumer has a great internet connection there can be sometimes when web-applications can be accessed slowly. It is because your entire program is sent from your computer to cloud and then after completing requests of cloud consumer it is sent back to the personal computer. This whole process takes time to compete. As cloud consumer is requesting and in return cloud provider is responding to user requests.
Limited features:
For a desktop application, the user is provided with lots of advance features whereas in cloud hosting user has to run his application on cloud. Running the application on cloud provide limited features to the cloud consumer.
Data might not be secured:
With cloud hosting, it is said that whole data is stored in the cloud. But how to ensure that cloud is secure enough or not? There are several unauthorized users who somehow managed to access over company’s confidential data.
Stored data can be lost:
As per theories, stored data in the cloud is not safe as it is replicated on multiple servers. To rely completely on cloud hosting can put the user at high risk because what to do if the cloud is lost somewhere in space?
It is always important to consider both the aspects before making any decision to choose cloud hosting or not. Undoubtedly, cloud hosting gives lots of advantages to cloud consumers but it is necessary to consider risk elements as well.